Judith Chase Gilbert is briefed by Nuclear Medicine Technologist J.R. Aguilar before taking part in a study on Alzheimer’s disease at Georgetown University Hospital in May 2015.

WASHINGTON D.C. — The spending deal Congress reached Tuesday night includes an unprecedented increase in funding for Alzheimer’s research: $350 million in fiscal 2016. If approved by the White House, it will increase government spending on the disease by over 50 percent.

Advocates have long pushed for significant increases in Alzheimer’s spending, calling it a coming crisis and saying it should be funded at the same level as cancer, HIV/AIDS and heart disease research.

A panel of scientists convened by the Alzheimer’s Association estimated that the National Institutes of Health would need $2 billion a year to maximize the chances of curing or preventing the disease by 2025. This year’s increase puts the NIH well on its way toward that goal.

“It’s perhaps some of the most encouraging news we’ve had on Alzheimer’s disease in several years,” said Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging and the Mayo Alzheimer’s Research Center. “This is truly very, very exciting in the field.”

If each year the funding is increased by $350 million, he noted, the $2 billion goal would be reached by 2020.

That is significant, advocates say, because the United States faces a ticking time bomb in terms of the financial and personal costs of Alzheimer’s.

By 2025, the number of people age 65 and older with Alzheimer’s is estimated to reach 7.1 million — a 40 percent increase from 5.1 million today, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Spending on Alzheimer’s and other dementias is $226 billion a year, over two-thirds of which comes from Medicare and Medicaid.

The proposed increase is many times larger than last year’s, when a $25 million increase was budgeted for Alzheimer’s research. That brought NIH funding to $586 million in fiscal 2015 — a negligible amount compared with HIV/AIDS and heart disease, which receive $3 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively.

Alzheimer’s was “not in the ballpark,” Petersen said. “And yet people predict that Alzheimer’s is the disease of our time.”

Without significant breakthroughs to cure or prevent the disease, the number affected by 2050 could rise to 13.8 million, with costs soaring to as much as $1.1 trillion a year in public and private spending.

Source: Washington Post